


One Moment For All Time

by mad_martha



Series: The Lodger Series [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU, Drama, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-03
Updated: 2011-07-03
Packaged: 2017-10-21 00:08:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/218628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mad_martha/pseuds/mad_martha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When change comes, sometimes it takes a little help to keep going.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Moment For All Time

**Author's Note:**

> This story ties in with my earlier story "The Lodger", and occurs a few weeks after that one ends.

Three days, Harry Potter reminded himself.

It was only three days since Draco had left to go to Hogwarts.  Really not enough time to start feeling low and oppressed … to start noticing things like the sound of the kitchen tap dripping, or Hedwig sharpening her beak on her perch in the study, or the general creaking and sighing of the house around him settling into its foundations. 

Not enough time to start noticing how quiet it was in the house with that extra person missing.

He drained his mug of tea, trying not to focus so obsessively on how loud his own swallowing sounded in his ears, and went to the sink to rinse it out.  He splashed the water a little, taking longer than necessary just to make noise.

This was ridiculous.

 _Three days,_ Harry reminded himself.  _If you can't handle three days, what kind of a basket-case will you be after three months?  This isn't good enough; you've got to get a grip._

Of course, it would have helped if he hadn't received the letter.  The thick, folded parchment even now lay on the counter-top, like the burned-out shell of a discharged bomb, the elaborate printed heading _"Wizard War Graves Commission"_ staring back at Harry offensively _._ He had replied to it – had replied within half an hour of its arrival two days ago – but had yet to find the strength to throw it into the fire.  Each time he'd picked it up so far, he'd found himself unfolding and reading it again, and then the anger would surge up once more and he'd be forced to drop it back onto the counter again and walk away.

He looked up at the clock: three hours until he had to leave for his shift at the shelter.  He looked out of the kitchen window; it was gloomy and oppressive outside - _like his mood_ \- and threatening rain, but better to be outside than in when the walls were closing in on him.

Harry picked up his dragonhide gloves and pruning shears and went out into the garden for a couple of hours.

There was a section of the garden that he kept under a Notice-Me-Not Charm at all times.  The attitude of some of his fellow wizards, combined with the attack on his house the previous autumn, had made him very slightly paranoid.  Most of his own possessions he was indifferent to, but many of the things in his home had belonged to his godfather or other people Harry valued highly and those were a different matter.

And this peaceful spot in the garden was probably the most important part of the property of all.  Behind the pear tree, in the shelter of the garden wall and hidden from casual view, were two low, irregular pieces of Dartmoor granite, a patch on each smoothed and carved with names and dates.  These were the graves of Sirius Black and Remus Lupin.

"Morning, Padfoot.  Morning, Remus," he murmured, touching the headstones lightly in turn.  "Looks like it's coming on to rain again." 

Talking to a grave would once have seemed bizarre to him, but age and war taught you a few things - mostly about the fragility of life and the nearness of the dead.  Harry was grateful that he still had things left to connect with in this way, and chatted away quietly as he slowly cleared the area of soggy leaves, dead stems and ambitious weeds.  Then he began to tackle the tougher customers, hacking determinedly at plants that seemed to want to get a clawed grip on him.

"I don't know what it is about these blackberries," he said conversationally, as he attacked some young brambles with the shears, "but they seem to be particularly rampant on this side of the garden.  Are you _sure_ they're Muggle-types, Remus?  I distinctly remember you telling me that there are no magical plants on this side of the garden.  Mind you, they could just be taking over.  I suppose I'll have to ask Neville's advice some time." 

He paused, considering the tangle in front of him.  Gardening at this time of year was necessary but dismal.  Nothing looked at its best.

"Of course, if Draco decides he can handle the work, I might be visiting Hogwarts occasionally.  I could just go in and see Neville, instead of running into him by accident once or twice a year."  Harry paused again, trying to remember the last time he'd been out to tidy the graves.  "I did tell you about Draco being offered the Potions Master's job, didn't I?  It was Snape's idea - he's finally admitting that he can't do everything." 

The first, heavy spots of rain were beginning to fall.  Harry smiled faintly, not noticing. 

"Yeah, I know what you think of that, Sirius.  But Snape's not so bad these days."  He wrestled with a particularly tough dandelion that had cheekily set up home right against the headstone.  "God, this is as big as some of the ones in Hagrid's herb patch …."  The plant suddenly gave way and he sat back rather abruptly on his heels.  "Ow!  Look at the root on it!  This, from the grave of the man who told me he never let grass grow under his feet."

He stopped abruptly, looking blindly at the dandelion.  Hagrid's herb patch … Sirius standing in front of the kitchen sink, laughing … Neville helping him to lay turf over the mounded earth of two fresh graves ….

Harry dropped the weed and his pruning shears, tilting his head back to look up into the heavy grey sky.  Rain was falling steadily now and ran down his face and neck, cold and sour-tasting.

"Stop this, you idiot," he told himself angrily.  "Stop it _right now._   What the hell is the matter with you?"

 

*

 

If Harry had been looking for a diversion when he arrived at the shelter that afternoon, he was to strike lucky.  He had barely hung his coat in the staff office before the sounds of a quarrel filtered through from the games room, making him sigh with exasperation.  The damp weather meant that they had a lot more kids visiting than usual, and some of them were newcomers who occasionally caused trouble with the 'old hands'.

He walked through to the games room and was just in time to see Tharik, one of the ringleaders of a gang who regularly used the facilities, slamming a slender white youth face first into the pool table.  A sizeable crowd of other kids, black or Asian in the main and none of them older than sixteen, stood in a half circle around the two boys, all yelling their encouragement.  The noise was incredible.

"Hey, come on - break it up!" Harry snapped, wading in.

Tharik looked up, but didn't release his grip on the other boy.  His face was smooth and inscrutable, but Harry was familiar with the righteous fire in the boy's dark eyes.

"This guy's packing shit, man.  That's against the rules."

Oh, _bugger._   Now he was closer, Harry could see a dozen or so small cling-film wrapped lumps scattered across the table. 

The rules of the shelter were very strict; no drugs were allowed on the premises, not even for personal use, and dealing was the absolute no-no.  These lumps could be anything from cannabis to crack; it didn't make the slightest bit of difference.  The shelter's charitable status, which allowed local churches and homeless groups to support them, hung on this rule.

"Can someone find Sally, please," Harry said to the crowd.  A couple of girls broke off and disappeared out of the door.  "Let go of him, Tharik."

"You sure?"

The youth he was holding spewed forth an uninventive stream of foul language, but Harry - and indeed most of his audience - was unimpressed.  They'd all heard it before, and in Harry's case he knew a whole extra vocabulary of swearwords that no one around here would ever have encountered.

"I'm sure.  There's no need for you to be picked up for assault."

Tharik snorted his opinion of this, but released his captive.  The other boy spun around but was blocked in on all sides by interested but largely hostile teenagers.

"You look familiar, but I can't place you," Harry said coolly, studying him.  "What's your name?"

The reply started with the words _Fuck you!_ and went downhill from there.

"Calls himself Luc," Tharik said, glowering.  "Asshole sells his shit around here.  Jerome and me, we warned him off this place only last week."

"I see.  Well, Luc, we have rules here - no drugs in any shape or form.  That's goes double for pushing, do you understand?  If the police think drugs are being used or sold around here they'll close us down and a lot of these people will have nowhere to go.  And unlike _you_ , some people need this shelter.  We don't like to stop anyone coming here, but if you break the rules - "

Harry didn't get a chance to finish.  "Luc" suddenly lashed out; Harry ducked, twisted, grabbed the boy's arm, and had him on his knees on the floor with his arm twisted up behind his back before the youth knew what had happened exactly. 

"Not clever," Harry told him mildly, ignoring the whoops and cheers from the other kids. 

The stream of profanity was now reaching ear-splitting levels.  Sally walked in then, her handsome face creased with anxiety.

"Harry, what's going on here?"

"He was caught with a stash on him," Harry told her.  The boy was making spirited attempts to break free, but to no avail; Harry had learned from some of the best Aurors in the British Isles and one Muggle kid wasn't going to get the better of him.  "What do you want me to do?  Call the police or just boot him out?"

Sally looked even more worried.  "If we call the police, they'll be around here for hours.  That'll put a lot of our regular kids off coming in here.  And they might just decide to close us anyway - you know how it works.  We're always on probation."

"He's known to Tharik and the others," Harry warned.  "He's been hanging around for a while, apparently." 

But he could see her point.  The shelter was in a bad area and although they tried hard to work with the police and other local agencies, there was always a communications barrier because of the confidentiality Sally and the other workers needed to maintain to keep the kids' trust.  Harry had witnessed more than one argument between one of the team and the local police which had ended with a stand-off and the police suddenly patrolling the area more intensively.  While Harry could understand their viewpoint, he deprecated their reaction to the shelter's work, which often led to kids in real need staying away out of fear of being picked up.

"Okay," he sighed.  "I'll kick him out."  He leaned around to look his captive in the eye.  "But your stash goes in the incinerator and you are banned from here, do you hear me?  If we see you hanging around this area again, we _will_ call the police."

The boy spat in his face and Harry let out a disgusted breath.  It took a real effort of will not to inflict a little 'incidental' damage on the youth as he wrestled him out to the front door, and he was certainly rougher than was strictly necessary as he shoved him out of it.

"Now get lost!" he snapped at the boy, and dragged a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe his face.  He sincerely hoped the young pusher wasn't carrying any unpleasant infections along with his drugs, although he'd got a medic at St. Mungo's to dose him with a whole host of inoculations only recently.  It didn't make him feel any less paranoid though.  He was reminded of Hermione, who had told him that in certain parts of America spitting at a police officer carried an automatic life sentence because of diseases such as AIDS.

The boy was glaring at him furiously from the middle of the road where he'd stumbled.  He jabbed a finger at Harry viciously.

"You, fucker - you're a dead man!"

"Funny!" Harry retorted.  "You'd think I'd have stopped walking around!"

The moment the words were out of his mouth he regretted them, for they were like a cold breath down the back of his neck.  What _was_ it with today and all these bad memories?  He shut the door on auto-pilot and when he turned around he found the other duty worker, Karen, staring at him.

"Harry?  Are you okay?"

He wondered what she saw in his face that made her ask.  Then he felt the cold sweat trickling down the neck of his sweatshirt.

"Nothing," he muttered.

"Don't let it get to you," she said gently.  "You know what these kids are like - death threats come more naturally to them than the word "hello"."

"I know.  It - it's not that."

"You need some tea," she said firmly.  "That's a hell of a scene to have to deal with when you first arrive."

He followed her into the staff office and watched as she put the kettle on.  After a moment or two he went to the little sink and wet a paper towel to wipe his face again.

"Sit down," Karen told him.  "Sally's got it under control out there."

He took a seat and stared numbly at the carpet in front of him until she handed him his mug. 

"Now tell me," she said.  "Why did you look like you saw a ghost?"

"Not a ghost."  Harry took a swallow of the tea and felt the heat spread through him like chocolate after a Dementor attack.  He wondered how much sugar she'd laced it with.  "It was just … just a really bad memory.  Someone else said that to me once."  He sighed.  "It's stupid - I haven't thought about that in years.  It was a bad part of my life, but I seem to be dwelling on stuff like that today."

Karen studied him thoughtfully from her own seat.  "Who said it?" she asked.

Harry smiled reluctantly.  "Would you believe me if I said it was Draco?"

Her eyes widened.  "Really?"

"Really.  I told you we were at school together, didn't I?  Well, we really hated each other back then - probably from the first moment we met, to be honest."  Harry paused, his mind dwelling uncomfortably on a scene at the bottom of the stairs to the Great Hall.  "Fifth year … was a pretty crap year.  By the end of the summer term we were all in a "take no prisoners" mood, I suppose.  I happened to run into Draco at a bad moment for both of us and he told me I was a dead man."  Harry snorted.  "And I replied exactly as I replied to that brat out there, which is probably why it felt like someone was walking on my grave."

And as potted histories went, that had to be the most non-specific description of the beginning of the war that Harry had ever heard anyone give.  Certainly it gave Karen no hint of the depths of the very real animosity that had prompted the exchange.  But what else could he tell a Muggle about a wizard war?  There was simply no way to make her understand why the memory dredged up such grief and horror in him.

"Sounds like you two have had a colourful relationship over the years," Karen commented gently.

"You could put it that way."

"Why?  Why did you take such a dislike to each other?"

"Because he was a little shit right from day one," Harry replied, without even having to think about it.  "His family were very rich and well-connected - or at least, they were back then - and he had a real attitude about lesser mortals - "

A low laugh interrupted him and he grinned ruefully at Karen's mirth-filled eyes.

"I can imagine!" she giggled.  "That guy has a mouth on him like I never heard before.  I didn't think people like him _existed_ anymore!"

It occurred to Harry that, by and large, people like Draco _didn't_ exist anymore, or at least not in the wizarding world, but he didn't say so. 

"Yeah, he was born with the proverbial silver spoon stuck up his rear and all that," he agreed.  "Me and my friends, we were different.  My best friend's family was really poor and my parents died when I was a baby.  As far as Draco was concerned, we had no business being at the same school as him and he tried his best to make our lives hell for it."

He shrugged lightly.  "He got over it – eventually."

Eventually ... after years of war and being forced to live in hiding for fear of becoming another tick on the vigilantes' hit lists.  After watching his mother commit suicide and giving evidence that sent his father to the executioner.

"Obviously," Karen said, amused, not knowing what was going through his head.  "Looks like you did too."

Harry tried to smile but failed.  "Yeah, well.  A lot has happened since then."

It didn't seem possible that Draco's small part in the war had been played out in the very early years of the conflict.  The first Death Eater trials, in which Lucius Malfoy and his son had been arraigned, had occurred within two or three years of Harry and his contemporaries leaving school, before Voldemort had got his claws fully into Fudge and the Ministry.

In retrospect, those had actually been quiet years compared to the horror of the conflict once it got into full swing.  It had been another eighteen months before Peter Pettigrew had been caught and Sirius exonerated.  Just over a year later Sirius and Remus had crossed the path of the Lestranges and met their deaths.

 _No, not again,_ Harry thought desperately, but the memory would not be denied and he relived once more the horror of watching Sirius die in agony as fungal growths erupted with magically-assisted speed throughout his body, destroying his vital organs one by one.  The process had taken a little longer with Remus because of his werewolf metabolism, and Harry had been the only person willing to stay by his side as it happened, mere hours before the rising of a full moon.

"Harry?"

That had been the worst part, although what followed was just as distressing.  A request to bury the two men beside his parents in the wizard graveyard at Hogsmeade had been curtly refused by the Ministry.  The cemetery, he'd been informed, was not a place for dissident werewolves and men with criminal records.  It had been a slap in the face for Harry and everyone working towards Voldemort's downfall, and it had only been explained when Cornelius Fudge was unmasked as Voldemort's mouthpiece a few months later.

Long before then Harry had gone into the garden of Phoenix Lodge and dug two graves there himself.  By hand.  A number of other people helped, of course, particularly Ron, but the bulk of the work he did himself.  The Order of the Phoenix had buried their own there in the garden of the house Sirius had loved, and there they stayed in spite of yearly suggestions by the Ministry that they should be moved to a "more suitable" heroes' plot in Hogsmeade.

"Easy," a voice said in his ear.  "Just take it easy, Harry ... let it out."

"Sorry," he muttered, but didn't realise he was actually crying until Karen matter-of-factly wiped his face with a soft cloth.

"It's okay," she said calmly.  "Maybe it's about time you got things off your chest.  You hold too much inside.  Anyone could see you were blue, even yesterday."

"Stupid," he muttered.

"Why?  Depression isn't always logical and you don't get "cured" of it."  She smiled slightly when she saw his expression.  "I guessed you were a depressive when you first came here, Harry.  I watched my eldest sister do battle with it on and off for years – she tried antidepressants, hypnotherapy, faith-healing ....  You get to know the signs.  But I'm guessing you just feel a little down right now, huh?  With Lord Fauntleroy out of the way."

The nickname made Harry chuckle weakly, especially as Draco himself would never have understood the joke.

"That's better," Karen told him, and she took his mug and refilled it.  When she returned, she had a square packet in her hand.  "I've got something here for you.  We were going to give it you later in the week, when Lisa got back, but she won't mind me doing it now."

He blinked in surprise.  "What is it?"

Karen sat down in the chair next to him and put the packet on his knee.  "She finally got her Christmas photos back and she thought you might like a copy of this one."

"What did she do, lose her camera?" he joked, for Christmas was long gone, but he began to fumble the paper off the parcel.  It felt like a glass-fronted frame, one of the simple kind that could be bought cheaply from a stationer's. 

When it was unwrapped, he stared at it for a long moment in silence.

"I don't remember this being taken," he said finally.

"You wouldn't either of you have stuck around if you'd known," Karen replied, amused.  "Good, isn't it?"

"It ... I don't know what to say.  It's brilliant."

And it was.  Harry had reflected once that he almost never saw Draco smiling naturally, for his masks were too firmly ingrained to easily let drop.  But just once in a while something would catch him off his guard and he would smile as brightly and naturally as a child, with no masks at all.

As he was smiling in this photograph, although for the life of him Harry couldn't remember why.  It had been taken on Christmas Day, probably while they were clearing up after the Christmas dinner they'd served for up to fifty or more disadvantaged local kids.  The two of them were standing side by side in the kitchen, both of them dishevelled and with their sleeves rolled up, but Harry was wearing a gravy-stained apron and Draco – Draco! – had a tea-towel thrown casually over one shoulder.  Someone not in the photo must have said something to make him grin like that ....

It was a Muggle photograph, of course, and it was that which made it so perfect.  It was one irreplaceable moment, and Harry knew that had this been a wizard photograph Draco's image would have moved, changed his expression ... would probably have hidden that smile behind one of his many masks.  But the Muggle camera had caught the moment for all time.

Harry looked up at Karen's mischievous smile and ridiculously felt himself growing tearful again. 

"Thank you.  It's ... it's perfect."

"I told Lisa she could have won an award with that picture," she replied, and her smile widened, " _if_ the judges had only known Draco, of course ...."

Harry breathed a laugh.  "He'd take being the central subject of an award-winning picture as his due!"

And they both looked at each other and laughed.

But when they were rinsing out their mugs, Harry said uncertainly to Karen, "About your sister ...."

She smiled a little sadly as she wiped her mug and hung it up. 

"She took an overdose, three years ago."

 

*

 

When Harry got home that evening, he went straight into the kitchen and lit the stove.  He put a kettle on to boil and prepared the teapot.  Then he paused ... and picked up the letter from the Wizard War Graves Commission.

For a moment his fingers itched to open it once more.  But with a firm nod to himself, he lifted the kettle and dipped the parchment into the lighted hob beneath.  It took a moment or two for the thick paper to catch, but he watched stoically as orange flames licked at it until it was well caught.  Then he put the kettle back and held the burning parchment at arm's length as it blackened and curled, until finally his fingers were at risk.  He dropped the last inch or so into a metal bucket in the corner, where it smoked and burned itself to ashes.

Then he took out the photograph of himself and Draco and put it on the counter in the spot where the parchment had lain for two days. 

He might move it to somewhere more private in a day or two, but for now it was in the ideal spot for him to see it when he was having his breakfast each morning.

 

 

 **\- The End -**


End file.
